Symposium: Thinking in Play

Presented to expand upon the Davis Museum's groundbreaking The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer exhibition, Thinking in Play will feature a series of conversations with leading scholars about the philosophy and design of Jason Rohrer’s games, moderated by Wellesley College faculty members.

Free and open to the public; reservations required. You may also opt to purchase a boxed lunch (below), available for pickup in the Davis lobby during the lunch break. Boxed lunches contain a sandwich/salad, chips, cookie, and bottled water.

The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer is curated by Michael Maizels, Mellon New Media Art Curator/Lecturer at the Davis, with an exhibition catalogue featuring contributions from University of Chicago game studies scholar Patrick Jagoda, distributed by MIT Press. The exhibition, catalogue, and related programs are generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional funds provided by Wellesley College Friends of Art.

Schedule of events

10:00am Check-in; complimentary coffee + pastries (Davis Lobby). The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer will be open early to registered participants.

10:45am Welcome remarks, Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro '37 Director of the Davis (Davis galleries).

11:00am - 12:10pm Panel 1: Visual Design (Collins Cinema)

Leigh Alexander is a writer and critic focused on the ways technology and media intersect with culture and self-expression. She is a regular columnist for the Guardian’s technology site, and was most recently editor-in-chief of Offworld, Boing Boing’s site dedicated to unsung voices and alternative culture in video games. As longtime editor-at-large for Gamasutra, she contributed game criticism, design analysis, industry trend editorial, and interviews with developers to the world’s best, ugliest website on the art of game development. She was a longtime featured columnist for Edge magazine, Kotaku, and Vice’s Creators Project and VICE UK and her features have appeared at Polygon and Boing Boing. She used to be NYLON Guys’ games editor, and in the past she’s contributed to Rock Paper Shotgun, Shut Up & Sit Down, Slate, The Atlantic, Paste, The New Statesman, The Guardian, The New Inquiry, the Columbia Journalism Review, TIME and others. With designer Ste Curran she co-founded the consulting imprint Agency, which works with firms of all sizes to streamline game designs and improve the way they communicate with audiences.

Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris is the one-woman team behind the blog The Tiniest Shark and a videogames PhD researcher at University of Portsmouth, UK. She also holds a Masters in Computer Engineering. She often speaks on game development (including on the BBC), entrepreneurship, games culture, and diversity issues, and is on the Advocacy Committee for the Game Developer's Conference 2014. She was named a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit 2013, was one of the Develop Top 30 Under 30 Developers to watch in 2012, and was a Kauffman Global Scholar in 2007. She is an Assistant Arts Professor at the Game Center at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Moderated by David Olsen, Assistant Professor of Art, Wellesley College.

12:20 - 1:30pm Panel 2: Game Mechanics (Collins Cinema)

Robin Hunicke is a designer, producer and CEO. She is a co-founder of independent game studio Funomena and an Associate Professor in game design at UC Santa Cruz. Hunicke has a background in fine art, computer science and applied game studies. Her titles include Journey, Boom Blox, and MySims for Nintendo Wii. Recognized for her role as an Ambassador for Woman in Games, Robin is an evangelist for diversity of thought and participation in game design and game culture. To that end, she co-organizes the annual Experimental Gameplay session at GDC, teaches and lectures extensively on game design and in particular, focusing on feeling in games.

Patrick Jagoda is Assistant Professor of English and an affiliate of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, specializing in media studies, twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, and digital game theory and design. Jagoda is the co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and serves as a co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry.

Moderated by Nicholas Knouf, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Wellesley College.

1:30 - 2:45pm Lunch break

2:45 - 4:30pm Keynote Presentation

Introduction by Michael Maizels, Mellon New Media Art Curator/Lecturer at the Davis Museum.

Jason Rohrer (b. 1977) is among the most widely heralded independent game designers in the brief history of the field. Drawing on a background that includes training in literature and music alongside computer science, his work is characterized by its conceptual and aesthetic elegance. Rohrer’s ascendance into the national spotlight began with Passage (2007)—a scrolling game set within a narrow space of only 256 pixels. He has gone on to produce prize-winning games such as Chain World­—a Garden of Eden-style game of which only one copy was ever produced—and A Game for Someone—a post-apocalyptic take on the board game that is currently buried in an unknown location in the Mojave desert. In 2012, Rohrer became one of the few independent designers included in the first Museum of Modern Art videogame acquisition.

Frank Lantz is the Director of the NYU Game Center and has taught game design for over 12 years at NYU, SVA, and Parsons. His writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications.

Lantz is a game designer who has worked in the field of game development for the past 20 years. In 2005 he co-founded Area/Code, which created cross-media, location-based, and social network games as well as the popular abstract puzzle game Drop7. Before starting Area/Code, Lantz worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.

Over the past 10 years, Lanzt helped pioneer the genre of large-scale realworld games, working on projects such as the Big Urban Game, which turned the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul into the world’s largest boardgame; Sharkrunners, which allowed players to interact with living sharks in a persistent virtual world, PacManhattan, a life-size version of the arcade classic created by the students in his Big Games class at NYU, and many other experiments in pervasive and urban gaming.